How To Open Winmail.dat Attachments

If you are not using Microsoft Outlook as your mail email client on your computer system, you may have noticed that you sometimes receive winmail.dat attachments sent by Outlook clients to your email software that you can't open on your system. Outlook users can sent so called Transport Neutral Encapsulation Format information with their emails, that contain email formatting instructions, so that the email on the recipients computer looks like the one on the senders PC.
Outlook unfortunately is one of the few desktop email clients supporting this format, with email clients not supporting the format displaying a winmail.dat attachment instead.
The core issue here is that these winmail.dat files may include attachments and email formatting instructions. If they only include the formatting instructions, they can easily be ignored. If the file size is relatively low, it is almost always the case that they do not include other file attachments.
If the file size is larger, they may contain both formatting instructions and file attachments. You can again check the file size of the winmail.dat attachment to make an educated guess. If the file size is in the hundreds of Kilobytes, chance is high that another attachment is contained within.
What you need in this case is a third party tool that scans winmail.dat files for attachments to save them separately from the formatted message. The free portable program WMDecode can do that. All you need to do is extract the file on your PC, and either place the winmail.dat file into the same program folder, or drag and drop it onto the file executable in the folder.
The program opens a command prompt window that is echoing the scan and extraction results. File attachments found during the scan are automatically saved individually in the same location the winmail.dat file resides in.
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You said that Outlook isn’t your main email client, so which is your main one?
I think its thunderbird
It is Mozilla Thunderbird.
Awesome! This actually solved my problem… what a stupid bug.
If this is the same bug that I’ve encountered, there may be another fix: (1) hover over open Outlook item in Taskbar, cursor up to hover over Outlook window item, and right-click; (2) this should give you Restore / Move / Size / Minimize / Maximize — choose Move or Size; (3) use your cursor keys, going arbitrarily N/S/E/W, to try to move or size the Outlook window back into view. Basically, the app behaves as though it were open in a 0x0 window, or at a location that’s offscreen, and this will frequently work to resize and/or move the window. Don’t forget to close while resized/moved, so that Outlook remembers the size/position for next time.
THANK YOU Claude!!! I could get the main window to launch but could not get any other message window to show on the desktop. You are my hero!!!!
Solved my issue! 6 years later and this is still problem…
Fantastic. Thank you. Size did the trick.
This solved my Outlook problem, too. Thank you. :)
Thank you so much, this started happening to me today and was causing big problems. You are a life saver, I hope I can help you in some way some day.
You are a god – thank you!
thanks a lot…. work like charm.. :-)
Yah…thanks Claude. I’ve been having the same problem and tried all the suggestions…your solution was the answer. It had resized itself to a 0/0 box. Cheers
Excellent post. This had me baffled even trying to accurately describe the problem. This fixed it for me.
Thank you
Thanks a lot for the article. Don’t know why it happenend, don’t know how it got fixed, but it was really annoying and now it works :-)
Thanks a lot. I was facing this issue from past 3 week. I tried everything but no resolution. The issue was happening intermittently and mainly when I was changing the display of screen ( as i use 2 monitors). The only option i had was to do system restore. But thanks to you.
I’ve been tried to sole this problem for 12hours. Your comment about changing the display of screen helped me a lot!! Thanks!!
Thank you…don’t know why this happened but your instructions helped me fix it. Running Windows 10 and office pro 2007
Great tip! Thanks!
Worked for me, too – thank you!!!
It’s Worked for me, too
thank you very much!
I had a similar issue with Outlook 2013 on Windows 10 and this helped me to fix it. Thank you very much!
Thank you so much. Solved!
Considering you published this in 2012, incredible not been debugged by Microsoft.
Thank you again. M
This problem was faced by only one user logging to TS 2008 r2 using outlook 2010.The issue was resolved.
Thanks.
Great tip. Thank you!!!! If it helps, I had to use the Control Key and the arrow keys at the same time to bring my window back into view. Worked like a charm.
Thank you, this worked !!!!
Man, you are a fucking god. Thanks a lot, what an annoying bug!!
Awesome, this post solved the issue. Many thanks!